Tag Archives: Fountainville Garden

Fallen cherry blossoms covered the ground beneath the trees. I was able to get a few images before the lawn mowing gang cut the grass and swept away the beautiful blooms. The past few weeks are typically my favorite weeks in the garden each year. For a few days we are lucky to have the flowering pears, flowering plum, flowering crab apple, and flowering cherries all in bloom at the same time. It is peaceful and beautiful in the garden.

The image below is a new perspective using multiple exposures while zooming out.

A different look is achieved by a long exposure and a zoom pan as seen below.

I was having a lot of fun creating multiple exposures and just experimenting with various artistic ways of processing images when I came up with this combination. I first started out taking individual images of fallen cherry blossoms. I then experimented with multiple exposures (5 exposures in this case). I then further experimented with different artistic presets in Topaz Impression (Georgia O’Keefe II) to arrive at this image.

When I saw this scene of our front porch, I felt like it was an impressionistic garden painting with all the pink and light green color. So, I post-processed the image that way using Topaz Impression plugin.

When things are working, keep the ball rolling. I was happy with the multiple exposure showed in my last post, so I thought I would try another as the wind was blowing the branches around. The multiple exposure feature of the 5D MkIII allowed me to see the combined image rather than waiting for post processing.

I was taking images of our flowering Bradford pear. I could not get anything that really caught my eye. Then the wind started blowing, the moving blossoms created a surrealistic image in my mind. How to capture this … why not try a multiple exposure. I took a 5 image multiple exposure slightly moving my camera, the wind took care of the rest.

As I was coming in from my morning shoot of our garden, I saw these two blooms intermingled in a clump of white and yellow daffodils. They reminded me of two close friends , one whispering in the other’s ear.

I cannot recall how many times that I have been getting ready to put my camera away for the shoot when that one last image pops up in front of me. It seems to be one of my most alert times. On multiple occasions, this last image is my select from the whole shoot.

Out in our “Back 40” we have several bunches of bright yellow daffodils. Ah ha … great background opportunity. Now I just needed to find something to put in front. A few emerging Japanese Maple leaf buds caught my eye. So I put them together. The challenge was to get an interesting composition while the branch was moving in the wind. A relative open f-stop and a moderate shutter speed gave me the best balance.

These subtle pink petals of our Star Magnolia caught my eye this afternoon. The tree is in full bloom. The blossoms are in a fresh crisp state which typically does not last very long. Wind and wet weather usually turn the petal edges brown within a day or two after the bloom. I caught it in the perfect state this year.

I softened the image slightly to give it a soft look. It adds to the feeling that I had when I was shooting the image.

The above image is a collection of fallen Atlas Cedar cones and Ginko leaves in our bird bath. The colors following the winter with all its snow were very muted. I thought B&W would be a good alternative.

These purple crocuses came out two days after the white ones. They do so every year. The white crocuses come out with a few blooms first, followed by the rest a couple days later. The purple crocuses seem to come out all at once. I was lucky with a couple of nice warm days when the blooms emerged. The last couple of days have been cold and rainy. The crispness of the flowers are now gone.

For Lexie: The way this image was achieved is different from the white crocus image in my post a few days ago. Large telephoto lenses have a narrow depth of field. My target here was to get enough depth of field to capture detail in the nearest petal, the center, and the farthest petal of the nearest bloom. It took an aperture setting of f/16 to achieve this. However, using this aperture also pulled in detail from the background flowers. I then took an image with the widest aperture (f/3.5) of my lens which only captured the center of the nearest flower in focus. The edges of the bloom and all the background blooms were not in focus. To make sure the images would line up when I processed them, I used a tripod.

Back on my computer, I combined the f/3.5 and f/16 images into a multiple exposure using Photoshop’s layers. The background layer was the sharp f/16 image. The second layer was the f/3.5 image. I added a layer mask to the second layer and “painted” through the nearest bloom of the f/16 flower. I then lightened the sharp bloom and darkened the edges to get the final image.